It’s National Payroll Week in the UK – an initiative organised by the Chartered Institute of Payroll Professionals (CIPP). It aims to demonstrate the importance of efficient payroll to the economy.

Payroll is crucial in business management and employee satisfaction. If payroll processes are locked down and run well, businesses will flourish.

If they’re not, payroll can be an administrative nightmare, shifting the focus away from what business owners love doing. Whether you are an accountant acting on behalf of your client, or a small business owner managing the payroll yourself, here’s how the right payroll software can help:

For accountants:

Payroll management has historically been the bain of an accountant’s life. They know their clients don’t want to get employee wages wrong. By combining a smart payroll system like Xero Payroll with Xero, it’s far easier to get the job done efficiently, and quickly.

Xero Me is an employee app that works with Xero Payroll. You can track time, mark holidays on a calendar and populate payslips. It’s not difficult to sell the benefits of the app to your clients – not only is the user experience seamless, but they gain the satisfaction of having all their important information in one place. It also means employees and employers benefit from more detailed reporting of their day-to-day activities.

There’s no need to manually input data from other spreadsheets. By using payroll software that automatically integrates with your accounting software, you don’t have to keep track of all the changes your team make or post journals.

There are a number of Xero partners saving time with Xero Payroll. Take Xero Gold Partner, David Hassel, Managing Director of DH Business Support and co-owner of XU Magazine. Xero Payroll has saved his firm twelve minutes per client per month. He’s reduced the time spent on admin tasks that detract attention away from helping the businesses he works with thrive.

As David explains: “When it comes to small businesses we don’t just want to give people a history lesson every year – we want to give them actionable insights that affect their business decisions moving forward. If you have the right data, you can tackle underlying issues within the company. It’s our job to make sure our clients really understand what’s happening so that they can move forward and build great businesses.”

Elsewhere, Danielle Cole, director at accounting practice, Whiting & Partners, commented on how Xero Payroll is helping the team: “Xero sorts everything, so there is nothing more for us to do at the end of the year. That saves us two hours per client compared to the system we used before. Clients love the paperless payslips and for me it’s easy to send them. I just press a button and off they go.”

For the small business owner:

Let’s be honest, you didn’t start your business just so you could spend time on admin tasks and payroll problems. Every spare moment that you have in the office should be spent on driving your business offering forward.

You really don’t want to get employee wages wrong. It’s the type of reputation that spreads fast and could cause problems when a business is hiring new people. It doesn’t bode well for employee satisfaction, not to mention the fact that it will cause you a headache to clear up the mess.

To avoid this, ensure you stay on top of leave, timesheets and payslips. Ideally, everything needs to be in the same format and the same place. If they’re tracked in different spreadsheets and google docs, it’s easy for things to get missed.

Using an app like Xero Me gives the satisfaction of having all the important information in one place. Employees submit their own timesheets, check their pay and manage leave requests – all from their smartphones. Aside from it being good for your employees, it’s good for business, too.

The great thing is that it reduces the amount of administration that businesses need to do. All the information that you need is accounted for, and as such is going to be more accurate, with less chance of employees being under or overpaid. Make sure you are aware of any regional laws around minimum pay periods – if you’re in the dark about this, you might end up breaking a law that you weren’t aware of.

Using an app likes Xero Me takes the hassle out of payroll by collating all the information you need and organising it in one place. Take a look here to find out more.

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